Darkness again falls on Europe: Jews fleeing France

The number of Jews leaving France for Israel is up 400% in the first quarter of 2014, according to AFP. The largest remnant of Jews in Europe surviving the Holocaust is now under a new threat, one that echoes the last century’s, but with new faces and names.

The Jewish Agency for Israel, a global body responsible for the immigration and absorption of Jews into Israel, said 1,407 people left France for Israel between January and March against 353 people a year earlier.

"This phenomenon is speeding up" said Ariel Kandel, the head of the Jewish Agency's French chapter. (snip)

Kandel told AFP that the reasons for the hike in numbers were a "climate of anti-Semitism" and the prevailing gloomy economic situation in France.

The French news agency’s story does not mention the words “Muslim” or “immigrant,” but the anti-Semitism that matters today in France is far different from the imported Nazi variety or the traditional French disdain that ensnared Col. Dreyfuss. Muslims, immigrants and their French-born children, principally from North Africa, are attacking Jews on the streets and making life unpleasant for anyone identifiably Jewish.

While France stagnates, weighed down by a welfare state and income taxes as high as 75%, Israel is booming, with a vibrant high technology economy. But it is almost certainly the violence and harassment that is driving French Jews out.

With more and more of the world’s Jewish population concentrated in one vulnerable country surrounded by neighbors who wish to drive Jews into the sea, the dark forces seeking extermination of the world’s most ancient ethnicity are floating on a rising tide.

The number of Jews leaving France for Israel is up 400% in the first quarter of 2014, according to AFP. The largest remnant of Jews in Europe surviving the Holocaust is now under a new threat, one that echoes the last century’s, but with new faces and names.

The Jewish Agency for Israel, a global body responsible for the immigration and absorption of Jews into Israel, said 1,407 people left France for Israel between January and March against 353 people a year earlier.

"This phenomenon is speeding up" said Ariel Kandel, the head of the Jewish Agency's French chapter. (snip)

Kandel told AFP that the reasons for the hike in numbers were a "climate of anti-Semitism" and the prevailing gloomy economic situation in France.

The French news agency’s story does not mention the words “Muslim” or “immigrant,” but the anti-Semitism that matters today in France is far different from the imported Nazi variety or the traditional French disdain that ensnared Col. Dreyfuss. Muslims, immigrants and their French-born children, principally from North Africa, are attacking Jews on the streets and making life unpleasant for anyone identifiably Jewish.

While France stagnates, weighed down by a welfare state and income taxes as high as 75%, Israel is booming, with a vibrant high technology economy. But it is almost certainly the violence and harassment that is driving French Jews out.

With more and more of the world’s Jewish population concentrated in one vulnerable country surrounded by neighbors who wish to drive Jews into the sea, the dark forces seeking extermination of the world’s most ancient ethnicity are floating on a rising tide.